So here we are basking in the glory of another great British Oscars night. And by British of course I mean English, as nobody else quite fits the stereotype required for success.
Think of them all – Chariots of Fire, The English Patient, The King’s Speech; all stiff upper lip, sexual inhibition and deep-rooted insecurity. Character acting – it’s what we do well and it’s what we’re expected to do.
And while Colin Firth picked up his gong and made us cringe with his quintessentially English acceptance speech, one thing struck me: how not unlike this we are in the UK public sector. We always fit type - we can’t help it.
In the movies it’s all gosh, golly, floppy hair, Mr Darcy and next thing you know it’s your big night in tinseltown with acceptance speech prepared (unless you’re Hugh Grant of course).
In the public sector along come the cuts and the reaction is exactly as would be expected; redundancies, service cutbacks, lots of angry protests and a general insular malaise that will last until hopefully everything’s better again.
What we are not seeing is many examples of organisations doing anything different, particularly looking beyond their traditional sources of funding and applying for new grants or forging new relationships with the private sector or even each other.
There are of course notable exceptions to this. Some organisations are truly pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved through innovative approaches to raising finance. But, out of the 10,000 public sector entities who receive some form of public funding, these laudable exceptions number in the 100s at best.
For the rest, billions of pounds of grants remain available from both the UK government and Brussels, but successfully accessing the cash requires new ways of working, new approaches and new ways of measuring success. For example, the government’s Regional Growth Fund will fund public private partnerships that deliver jobs in deprived areas. In the same vein there are still huge budgets available for training activity across the country.
These are just a couple of examples of what is available from the UK government. Add in Europe and private sector sources such as the Gates Foundation or the Wellcome Trust and the amounts are almost beyond the cost of Manchester City’s first team.
Now I know that a bog standard straight out of the tin public sector entity may not qualify for some of the funding available in its own right, but surely that’s missing the point. We need to shift our focus away from who qualifies to what qualifies and design services accordingly. It’s not the name on the cheque that matters, it’s what the cheque achieves.
The key to thinking about the grant funding industry is to recognise that that the bodies responsible for distributing the cash actually want to give it to somebody. That’s what they do. They give money to applicants who fit the criteria. There are no brownie points for them in getting to the end of the year with a full cheque book so work out what they want and how it fits with what you do or what you could do.
It’s not rocket science but how many councillors angrily denouncing Eric Pickles on Newsnight have actually applied or even spoken to a grant funder in the last year?
I worry that this reluctance to think differently about funding is symptomatic of a wider poverty of ambition in the UK. In the same week that the US launched their final space shuttle, I was told by a director of finance that his organisation would not be applying for a £10m training grant because ‘to be honest Michael, the application process is just too difficult’.
This contrast is so scary for the future of the UK economy that it is worth dwelling on. The Americans, despite inconceivable technical obstacles and the tragic loss of 18 lives, are still trying to ‘touch the face of god’ while we cannot be bothered to try and get funding for training our young apprentices in computer skills because it requires somebody somewhere to write a 20-page application form.
I am currently fixated on grants because there is so much money available and the take up of discretionary European grants in the UK is so poor compared to our switched on, yellow jumper wearing, continental cousins. However I could have written much the same article about the yawning chasm of the relationship between the public sector and the private equity community, the private sector or the pension industry.
The key point is that the public sector needs to get over the untimely death of New Labour, stop being angry at bankers and accept that the world has moved on. We are not in Kansas anymore Toto.
Hugh Grant will never win an Oscar for playing a floppy haired fop because that’s all he ever plays and Colin Firth’s pony can do that trick and has few more up its sleeve besides. Hugh would have a better chance if he made the effort and played against what we expect. I want to see him as a young Ronnie Briggs or even playing the lead in a gritty biography of George Best directed by Danny Boyle.
The public sector needs to make the same paradigm leap in the face of cuts. Do what everybody least expects; work with each other across boundaries, get gleefully not reluctantly into bed with the private sector, and above all else apply for discretionary grants.
Do this and you may get to give a tearful acceptance speech thanking your agent, your dog and your mother. Stay within the dreary constraints of our expectations and you risk ending up in the corporate equivalent of panto. With Timmy Mallet.
Michael Ware is a corporate finance partner at BDO
